Avoiding “The Night Porter” Trap (and Website Updates)
- Lavavoth
- Mar 27, 2017
- 3 min read
Warning: Abundant display of nudity, swastikas, and other
Nazi insignias in this disturbingly bizarre scene from The Night Porter, starring Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde.
Grant Leads to First Steps in Branding
The process of having to write a narrative that addressed specific questions about my project...has grounded my understanding of the work and its motive.
After applying for an art grant, which offered an opportunity for me to reflect on branding, I decided it was time to update my website, should any of the grant reviewers want to check out my site. The grant is really competitive and I don’t anticipate getting it. Still, the process of having to write a narrative that addressed specific questions about my project, Blind Love, has grounded my understanding of the work and its motive.
I try not to interrupt my creative process prematurely with analysis. Although I do not dismiss direction, objective, and meaning, getting bogged down by over-thinking the intention of the work muddles the process. It is only after I’m complete, or nearing completion that I begin to observe and analyze its true direction and intention.
In the “About” page of my site, I delve into explaining this. In fact, I copied half of my grant proposal on this page.
The "Nazi Chic" Trap and Nazisploitation
That’s part of why I placed Blind Love in a dystopian, mythic world—one that distances itself from the swastika and replaces it with campy symbols: broken hearts, misappropriated medals, military garb reassembled from fragmented eras.
Although Blind Love is an edgy and provocative illustrated novel full of what a friend once jokingly called “Nazi heartthrobs,” it is, at its core, a story about resistance—a kind of "Romeo and Juliet [1] set in a fictionalized Nazi Germany," as another friend described it.
Their off-the-cuff remarks left me unsettled. I don’t want Blind Love to be misconstrued, much less lumped into the same category as Liliana Cavani's 1974 film The Night Porter, which Roger Ebert dismissed as “Nazi chic,” while a New York Times reviewer labeled it “Nazi decadence.” After watching the film, I understood the backlash. It’s disturbing, to say the least.
This anxiety around misreading is rooted in a broader concern with a genre sometimes called Nazisploitation—a term used to describe media that sensationalizes Nazi aesthetics through erotic, violent, or provocative tropes, often flattening historical trauma into pulp stylization. I’m aware of the dangers of visual allure becoming entangled with fascist imagery.
That’s part of why I placed Blind Love in a dystopian, mythic world—one that distances itself from the swastika and replaces it with campy symbols: broken hearts, misappropriated medals, military garb reassembled from fragmented eras. The reused tunics, caps, and iron crosses aren’t meant to glorify but to disorient, to carry a sense of lurid familiarity and historical dread [2].
Is love blinded by its own intoxication?
A couple of the questions that I hope to convey are: “Is true love limitless?” and “Can we truly ever love our enemies?” “Is love blinded by its own intoxication?” I want to explore the struggles and limitations of the characters, which means, the struggles within myself–although there is also spirit channeling taking place, as you know from previous blog posts.
I call onto Psyche and Eros to work with me and through me to support me in the process of manifesting this unusual and dark love story…
Notes
[1] What’s uncanny about my calling it a Romeo and Juliet story is that Hans loved that play. I only learned this later, after the comparison had already taken root.
[2] Even now, I continue to wrestle with how to recontextualize the story and its imagery in a way that examines one aspect of my relationship with Hans without it being reduced to or dismissed as Nazi chic.
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